So, I'm soon to be jumping into unraid from FreeNAS. I have a plan and I wanted some feedback as to the feasibility of said plan.

What (will) I have

• Gen1 Ryzen3
• Appropriate motherboard (atx)
• 16GB DDR4 Memory (non ECC)
• WD Black 250GB NVME drive
• 4x 3TB Seagate Ironwolf drives
• LSI controller card

My Goal

So right now, this will be running the storage and 'stable' services on my network, with the intention of having my CCTV (Blue Iris, on Win10 VM) and plex. It'll also act as storage ONLY for the lab section of my network.

My Plan

OS, VM's and Containers running on NVME SSD

Storage on the HDD's

 

My current FreeNAS installation on an old HP Microserver (g7) will become my lab area, probably running Proxmox, using my old mismash of HDD's. It's becoming unreliable but for lab use and testing I'm not fussed.

 

What are your recommendations?

I'm also toying with having a disk drive installed on the server to digitise my DVD collection onto Plex as well. Possible?

1 minute ago, Himaro said:

OS, VM's and Containers running on NVME SSD

VMs and containers on SSD is the usual and best way.

 

But the Unraid OS is installed fresh from the archives on a USB flash drive into RAM each time it boots and the OS runs completely in RAM. There is no way to "install" it any other way, since the GUID of the boot flash is tied to your license.

 

You could think of those archives as the "firmware" of an embedded system. That flash also contains any configuration settings you make, including disk assignments, so they can be reapplied at boot.

7 minutes ago, trurl said:

But the Unraid OS is installed fresh from the archives on a USB flash drive into RAM each time it boots and the OS runs completely in RAM. There is no way to "install" it any other way, since the GUID of the boot flash is tied to your license.

Not a huge fan of that to be fair. I was hoping I could install it. I just don't feel comfortable running operating systems from a USB drive. 

1 minute ago, Himaro said:

Not a huge fan of that to be fair. I was hoping I could install it. I just don't feel comfortable running operating systems from a USB drive. 

It is not possible to change that.   However you are ‘loading’ the OS from the USB drive, not ‘running’ from it.

2 minutes ago, Himaro said:

Not a huge fan of that to be fair. I was hoping I could install it. I just don't feel comfortable running operating systems from a USB drive. 

As I explained, it doesn't run from the USB drive. The USB drive is accessed very little. Only at boot time to unpack the archives, and to save configuration changes when you make them so they can be reapplied at boot.

 

The OS is installed in RAM and it runs in RAM.

 

 

Well, the decision wouldn't have been made if the devs didn't believe it would be reliable. And as I don't ever intend to power it off, it really shouldn't be an issue.

I'll put my discomfort aside and go ahead with it. I'll eventually be replacing the hardware with server grade stuff when I get the chance, which will include ECC memory...

You can download a backup of the flash drive in the webUI, and if there is ever a problem with the flash drive, that backup can be used on a new flash drive and your license can be transferred to the new one.